License compliance calculation, as well as configuration management, requires a thorough and accurate picture of software installed on each monitored machine (e.g., computer, server, etc.). Accordingly, configuration management systems, as well as license compliance systems, must scan each monitored machine to obtain a complete picture of software that is installed on the respective machine. However, in order to save disc space and ease product maintenance, software is commonly installed on one or more shared discs (forming a shared file system) that are accessible by multiple servers (machines). In order to obtain a thorough picture of installed software, a configuration management product that is installed on each of multiple servers in a system environment must execute an inventory scan of the shared file system and search for installed software. Because a shared file system can be typically mounted by hundreds or even thousands of server machines, this scan operation can be resource and network intensive and can strain valuable system and/or network resources. Accordingly, when many server machines access shared file systems to perform a software inventory scan, the file-sharing servers are inundated with work and their performance (i.e., shared discs) may be compromised, thus, rendering them unable to perform a real workload which is their primary function.
Accordingly, to assure that a file-sharing server is available for performing a real workload, a shared file system scanning feature is usually disabled and can be selectively enabled by, for example, system administrators so as to balance accuracy of software discovery with system performance.